Late Honors

The roar of an airplane engine is one of the few things that bring hope to the Fugnido refugee camp, a desolate stretch of Ethiopia where 57,000 survivors of Sudan's civil war subsist. But on Aug. 7, Fugnido's residents listened in vain for the sound of the Twin Otter carrying Texas Congressman Mickey Leland, 44, who had visited five times before. His plane had crashed nose-first into a mountain 30 miles away, killing all 16 aboard.

When searchers located the disintegrated plane last week, the late-night vigils in Leland's Capitol Hill office ended, and the Washington practice of canonizing its own began. Leland, who in his life had difficulty dragging colleagues away from junkets to Paris and Bermuda to join him on trips to ! Appalachia, Africa, Indian reservations and migrant camps, finally in death found allies for his cause.

Although Leland had managed to persuade the House to create the Select Committee on Hunger and make him its chairman in 1984, famine lost its luster once the strains of We Are the World faded and the television lights went off. There is little money or prestige in hunger. Leland earned $22,650 in special- interest speech-giving fees in 1988; Illinois Congressman Dan Rostenkowski, chairman of the tax-writing Ways and Means Committee, earns nearly ten times as much as that. Laying guilt trips on colleagues until they provided $800 million for starving Africans during the sub-Saharan famine in 1985 did not ease Leland's entry into the insider's club. When he spent a night with Washington's homeless in the winter of 1987, it was criticized as a publicity stunt.

Leland's successes came in part because he was hard not to like, and he would not give up. The dashiki he wore in the Texas legislature gave way to Armani suits, the clenched fist to working within the system. After persuading New Jersey Republican Congresswoman Margaret Roukema to join him on a trip to Africa in 1984, Leland got in to see Ronald Reagan, who then agreed to support more foreign food aid and order ships loaded with grain to head for Ethiopia. Leland leaves his wife Alison, who is two months pregnant, a son -- and a world less hungry than it would have been without him.